You have a bad review: should you wait before collaborating?

It is a fair question: if somebody is going to speak well of your business and whoever hears it looks you up, they will also find what others have said. Is it worth cleaning up before investing?

First, keep it in proportion

A business with no negative reviews at all raises more suspicion than one with a few. People know how to read: an isolated complaint among twenty good comments stops nobody.

What does stop people is a pattern. Four different people saying the same thing is not bad luck, it is information.

What to do first

If there is a pattern, fix it. No campaign compensates for a real, repeated problem, and bringing new people to that problem only multiplies the complaints.

Reply to the ones still unanswered, especially the negative ones. A calm response, without arguing and offering a solution, says more about you than the original complaint. And newcomers read your reply, not just the reproach.

What is not worth it is arguing in public or trying to make them disappear. It shows, and it makes the whole thing worse.

What a collaboration can do here

Quite a lot, actually: if there was a bad patch and it is now resolved, a recent, honest recommendation from someone local carries more weight than a comment from a year ago. New displaces old.

What you must not ask for

Do not ask the person to address the negative reviews to rebut them. It puts an outsider in the position of defending you, it reads as propaganda, and it draws attention precisely to what you wanted to leave behind.